Why Use a Hyperscaler to Host SAP Business One?

Hosting SAP Business One in the cloud is a logical step for forward-thinking businesses who want to set themselves up for strategic growth. As the world moves towards digital transformation, cloud-based ERP solutions, such as SAP Business One, are fundamental to help companies grow and face future challenges head on. One of the key decisions when deciding to go cloud-based however, is whether to use a hyperscaler or a private cloud? Read on to discover our six key reasons for using a hyperscaler to host SAP Business One.

What is a Hyperscaler?

The term ‘hyperscaler’ refers to global cloud hosting services, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, which have datacentres around the world providing scalable and highly distributed hosting environments. This term is becoming increasingly common to differentiate cloud hosting services from private cloud set-ups, which refers to infrastructure hosted on dedicated servers – either on-premise or in a third-party datacentre. Cloud hosting for SAP Business One offers significant advantages to businesses, enabling them to leverage the full potential of their solution – in this blog, we will explore why hyperscalers are the best option for hosting SAP Business One as private cloud often lacks many of the advantages that hyperscalers can provide.

Scalability and Flexibility

As the name implies, scalability and flexibility are key features of the hyperscaler cloud offering. These features allow businesses to scale their resources up, or down, due to fluctuations in demand. This means that they don’t need to overprovision their resources and pay for compute power that they don’t need, which may be the case in private cloud environments, but can easily scale as demand increases. As SAP Business One is an ERP solution designed primarily for SMEs, the scalability and flexibility offered by hyperscalers is a big advantage. SMEs are more vulnerable to the effects of variable market conditions than large enterprise, so it is more important for them to stabilise their cashflow by not spending on overprovisioned resources.

Reliability and Disaster Recovery

Reliability is one of the key concerns when businesses are looking at cloud-hosting providers. The cost of not being able to access critical business systems, even for a short period of time, is significant and the impact on business operations can be devastating if systems are inaccessible for any reason over a longer period of time. AWS has datacentres distributed across multiple regions and availability zones, which provides geographic redundancy in the event of hardware failure or natural disaster. This enables failover to other availability zones to ensure continuous operation. AWS commits to an uptime SLA of 99.9995%, which gives added assurance to businesses of the availability of their essential business solutions.

In contrast, it would be a lot more expensive and complicated to set up a private cloud with the same level of redundancy and disaster recovery that a hyperscaler offers as standard. Resources and infrastructure, which would stand idle most of the time, would need significant additional investment to achieve similar reliability levels as those offered by a hyperscaler.

Advanced Security and Compliance

Security should be of the utmost importance to any business, particularly as stories of hacking and data loss are becoming so common. Even large organisations, such as Transport for London, that you would imagine would be immune to hacking attempts have experienced high profile data breaches. To help counteract data breaches, hyperscalers invest billions into their security measures, including advanced encryption, multi-factor authentication, advanced threat detection using AI and state-of-the-art antivirus software. Regular security audits ensure compliance with global regulatory standards.

While private cloud providers can offer secure environments, maintaining the same level of security and compliance requires significant ongoing investment and expertise. Hyperscalers, on the other hand, continuously update and improve their security protocols to stay ahead of evolving threats. They also offer built-in compliance tools to help businesses meet industry-specific regulatory requirements, reducing the burden on IT teams.

Cost Efficiency

Cost efficiency is a critical concern for most businesses and choosing a hosting environment is no different. A main advantage of using a hyperscaler for cloud hosting is the pay-as-you-go pricing model, which turns their hosting overhead into an operational, rather than capital, expense. Only paying for the resources they need means they don’t have money tied up in overprovisioned resources, which has a positive effect on cashflow. Hyperscalers also offer economies of scale due to their large size and purchasing power, meaning they can pass on lower costs for storage, compute power and networking services.

Global Reach and Performance

The global reach of hyperscalers is one of the key features that appeal to many growing businesses with big ambitions. SAP Business One is a multi-jurisdictional and multi-lingual ERP solution so it makes sense to host it on a hyperscaler that has a global reach. Being deployed on a datacentre geographically closer to users ensures low latency and high performance. It also allows businesses to easily comply with data residency requirements, pertinent to certain countries.

In contrast, private clouds typically have limited geographic coverage, which can lead to latency issues or compliance challenges if your business expands into new regions.

Innovation and Access to Cutting-Edge Technologies

Hyperscalers are at the cutting edge of technological innovation and invest billions of dollars each year to stay at the forefront, continually investing in developing new services and features, such as machine learning and AI, IoT, big data analytics and blockchain. As these services are built into the hyperscaler ecosystem, they can be easily accessed by customers without the need for complex infrastructure changes. The resources behind hyperscalers mean that it would be impossible for private clouds to compete with the hyperscaler level of investment in technological advancement.

This innovation means that hyperscalers are able to offer a wide range of managed services to simplify IT management. Automated patching, updates and backups reduce the need for manual intervention, enabling businesses to focus on using SAP Business One to drive growth without needing to worry about infrastructure maintenance.

Conclusion

Using a hyperscaler to host SAP Business One is the logical choice for forward thinking businesses who want to optimise their operating efficiency and reduce overheads, while taking advantage of the many benefits that cloud technology offers. The high level of security and compliance, scalability, flexibility and innovation simply cannot be matched by private cloud, and the investment to come anywhere close to the levels offered by hyperscalers would be prohibitive. This makes hyperscalers, such as AWS, the ideal choice for businesses who want to maximise the value of their SAP Business One solution.

Cloud4Partners works with SAP partners to migrate their SAP Business One customers to our AWS cloud platform. To find out more about how we can help you, please contact our highly qualified, professional and friendly team now.

Benefits of Moving to a Cloud ERP